


Give and Take

by Tierfal



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:30:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s supposed to be the end of everything, because then he won’t have to figure out what happens next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give and Take

**Author's Note:**

> I, um, haven't actually seen the movie with Eight. But this was SUPPOSED to be about the ending bit, not the beginning; it's just that the fics never listen to me.

He’s shaking, not with the fear, not with the cold. He’s shaking with the destruction building up inside of him, swelling, priming to break free.

Everything he has ever loved lies in tatters at his feet. The Capitol is ash. The whole of Gallifrey is a senseless rock. Every other TARDIS has fallen; just days—hours—moments ago, they were a flock of bluejays flitting through the amber sky. He was one among many; some among much; he participated; he belonged. Now he does nothing more or less than to remain.

He has two choices. He can run—spend his fragment of eternity running, ducking, weaving, struggling to stay one half-step ahead of the plague that will hound him to the end of his days. He can survive.

Or he can stay and see it to the end—to the end of everything. He can be the end.

It’s not even a choice, not when he can seal it all here, stop it now. Not when running means loosing the plague on an unarmed, unwitting universe and watching every planet loved by others come to this.

He has to stay. He owes it to the ones he’s run from in the past. He can’t give them an apology, but he can offer that.

His TARDIS is in flames, in pieces, shattering around him where they hover above the wreckage, with a thousand-thousand silver ships fanned out below them, waiting only for the order to win their war at last. But the two of them have always been so perfectly aligned, he and his TARDIS; and she, like him, has just enough left in her to finish it.

They took it. They took it all. They took the greatest civilization in the unimaginable history of the universe and tore it to shreds, out of jealousy and bigotry and spite. They took his world, his work, his people; they dashed them all to nothing.

He wants revenge.

He wants to see the metal monsters bleed, to watch their triumph crumble, to listen to their static-stutter screams and let them fade out into silence. He wants to leave them turning soundless in the blackness, knowing in their final moments that they have failed, and they are never going home.

It’s already true for him.

And now, perhaps, the universe’s most effective warriors have been unraveled by their greatest asset—still the silver discs wait, spinning, for the last command. They’re nothing isolated. They cannot act alone. He wants to believe that makes him better even now.

He routes the wires and the cables and the tubes into the heart of his only true companion, and then he channels the last of her considerable power into the detonator.

He activates it.

Everything explodes.

 

 

Then he wakes up.

He’s amazed he can feel like this and not be dead. Amazement takes most of his energy, though he has enough in reserve to be appalled at his own audacity.

He’s lying on his back, and his head is twisted, at a not-entirely-natural angle, to the right. He’s startled at the quantity of blood, then terrified as he realizes that it’s all his. Everywhere it’s pooling, spreading, dribbling; he can hear the dripping clearly, probably because his heartbeats are so faint.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The first finger of his right hand is gone. He has no idea where it could be, though he hopes he never unexpectedly finds out. He closes his eyes and concentrates on what’s left to him—the last gift of the people that burnt and vanished into the index of Time’s endless volume.

He doesn’t want it.

He’s done. It’s over. He lies still, trying to contain it, striving to still the atoms of his being, tasting his own blood, tasting smoke and oil and time and pain, his and the TARDIS’s, theirs together. He labors to make his eyelids rise, and he’s too tired for disappointment when he sees the golden ether seeping outward from the palm of his ruined hand.

He shuts his eyes again. He sleeps.

 

 

The Doctor gasps as he awakens, scrabbling automatically for a handhold—for the bed-frame, for the console, for the cold lines of reality. He catches something, but it’s warm.

“Doctor!” Rose is saying, over and over, wringing the life out of his fingers with one hand and pushing him down onto his back again with the other. “You just—you hit your head, that’s all; except you looked awful, and I thought—well, I didn’t know, and—”

They’re in the TARDIS; he sensed it immediately, long before he could distinguish what a grating feels like.

“How do you feel?” Rose asks desperately, clinging so tight that he’s going to lose that finger again in a minute. “Is there something I can do?”

“Let go of my hand?” the Doctor suggests.

Rose flushes and tries not to look wounded, her arms snapping back to her sides and then crossing over her chest.

“That’s not what I meant,” the Doctor says, and he levers himself up and wraps both arms around her.

“Well, you could’ve said so,” Rose mumbles shyly, hiding her grin in his neck and hugging him back.

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asks, and they remain that way for a long time—her smiling, him burying his face in her soft hair. For that long moment, he stays.


End file.
